ABSTRACT
Throughout much of the twentieth century, Harlem was unquestionably the symbolic capital of black America. This chapter explores some of the processes that constrained Harlem's history-making capacity in the 1980s and 1990s when the community was whipsawed by both a drug "epidemic" and the so-called "war on drugs." Together these episodes are dramatic testimony to the local, national and global forces that came to bear on a predominantly African American New York community. The war on drugs has been the single most important cause of increasing the prison population. One of the starkest features of the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex is the shortage of "marriageable males" and the increase of women raising children alone. The war on drugs and the associated growth of the prison-industrial complex has stifled critical discourse in the larger society and dampened the ability of local communities such as Harlem to continue and extend their protest stance.
